Snake (2 page)

“I’ll pay for it. Clint can have one on the house, so to speak.”

I’ll pay.

“If you can tear yourself away from this club some night, come down and see us in Durban. I’ve got a spitting cobra that eats when he likes.”

“Come off it, Eve! You know you’re the real attraction!”

Double meanings next—he was doing well.

“Oh, ja? I fascinate you, do I?”

“Well, in a way, yes—yes, you do.”

“And why?”

He shrugged, looking more thoughtful than she had expected.

“Because I play with snakes?”

“That might have been it to begin with—I thought it would be interesting talking to you—but I’ve also had this funny feeling.…”

His sentence seemed to quite genuinely tail off, and his eyes left her as he frowned and bit his thumbnail. There was a job for him in show business as well, no doubt of that.

“My God, you’re not going to sulk, are you?” she said.

“Me?”

And he laughed softly, topping up her glass again, returning it to her with a flourish. The professional charm was switched on and off so suddenly you could almost hear the click.

“What exactly did you want to thank me for? I get paid for doing it, don’t I?”

“You. Your show. All of it.”

“Turns you on?”

“Does someone I know.”

“Hey! This is something new! Don’t tell me you’ve actually got a girlfriend hidden someplace?”

“Oh, she’s not here. She’s—she’s on holiday.”

“
Ach
, I realize that she isn’t standing outside the door, man. I was just surprised because, after what you’ve told me, it hardly seems likely that your old battleship would approve.”

“I never take her home with me,” he said solemnly.

“Hell! As bad as that, is it?”

He laughed longer than she did.

Sick, that, him wanting to watch Clint gobble up a guinea pig. Things were now taking a little time to sink in, which was also nice. She’d never watched, even though it was just a fact of life like any other Clint had to eat, but nobody had to see him do it. Most people would think the same way she did, so he couldn’t be all that typical. He was weird.

“Are you weird?” she asked, sipping a little more.

“What a question!”

“I was thinking about you wanting to gawk at Clint having his num-nums.”

“I’d just be interested. What’s weird in that?”

Nothing, when you thought about how excited the same thing would make small kids. If they saw it happen in a game reserve, they’d love it and show no pity or other inside things. If the snake came for them, that would be a different matter, but their fear—like his—was an outside one. And she saw that happening all around her every night to grownups.

“What are you dreaming about?” he asked, making his voice friendly but not quite covering his nervousness.

“I was thinking.”

“Is it catching?”

As if able to read her mind, he reached out again to touch the python.

“Not too close to his head,” she warned.

“Pythons don’t bite.”

“Who told you that?”

“But they’re not poisonous.”

“Blood poisoning. You can catch blood poisoning from his teeth—they’re dirty.”

He winced. “Can’t it go in the basket?”

“Just now.”

So the girlfriend was away. Oh, yes, that began to explain a few things. Such as a bottle of champagne so big that two people could get very drunk on it. A bottle that had probably been shown to quite a few eyes in the club earlier on, and there had also probably been jokes about her. Even a few coarse bets laid. It was becoming clearer.

“You haven’t been to my dressing room before,” she said.

“I know. So?”

“It wasn’t so private at the table.”

“What—what are you hinting at?”

Quick as a flash, he was. Look at the innocent smile.

“You told your friends you were coming here?”

“What?”

“Friends, pals, closest buddies.”

He frowned, as if he didn’t understand.

“Am I right?”

“I don’t really have any,” he said. “Certainly nobody I’d tell this to.”

Tell this to.

She hesitated. This was the moment to kick him out. Yet she could still be the loser: he could go back and make up something filthy for his cronies that would have them all outside, banging on the door, waving bottles. Or waiting for her in the alley, or tailing her back to the boardinghouse. The bugger of it was she had allowed him to stay too long already, and so kicking him out wasn’t going to solve anything. If only there was some way she could stop him from telling anyone stories that could hurt her—make him run off home with his tail between his legs. If only.…

There was a way! And by the time she had finished with him, he wouldn’t even want to think about it, let alone talk. She knew men.

“Equal shares,” she demanded.

“It’s not making you too … y’know?”

“Gives me funny feelings.”

He cocked his head at that, broadening his smile. Then concentrated on getting that extra bit more into her glass.

She adjusted Clint’s position, and her gown began to slip open in the front. She let it fall how it pleased, aware her bosom was gradually pushing out. Soon both patches would be catching the light.

“What sort of funny feelings?” he asked. “Do you think they’re like mine?”

“How should I know?”

“I—I can’t put mine into words,” he said.

“Nor mine either,” she said, letting her knees slowly part.

He gulped down what was left in his mug. Sweat seeped onto his brow. It must have felt like a wet dream coming true.

Her breasts were out. Round and full, but not so heavy she got a heat rash under them, as some did. Tanned a deep orange like the rest of her. Every bit.

“Something embarrassing you?”

“No!” He looked away.

Again, she knew what to do. She pulled Clint’s head around and guided him to slide down off her shoulders, parting her cleavage. This made the adhesive prickle and the patches feel as if they might pop off.

“Christ,” he said, staring.

She took Clint and redirected him so that he eased back up around her neck, his tongue flickering soft against her skin, his two little feet scratching as he twisted and used his belly scales. She moved as sensuously as the snake did, working him into a comfortable position, and then she held him there.

“I told you about staring,” she murmured.

“You actually … I mean, you really do get a.…”

“Isn’t that why you came round here tonight?”

“No, I didn’t.…”

“The show? Didn’t turn you on, too? Or is it only us girls?”

Clint was heading down between her breasts, running a sleek chin over her hard little belly. She let him think he was getting away, then clamped his head tight in her thighs, halting his slither, for just a second.

He went pale.

“Do you like the encore, baby?” she asked, parting her legs and allowing Clint to gain the floor. The python naturally went straight under the dressing table.

“Pardon?” he said, coming down off tiptoe.

“Does he make you feel jealous?” she asked, lolling back, an elbow in a mess of spilled powder. “That’s what most of them say. That Clint makes them jealous. Green, that’s the color they go.”

He took a pace toward her and then said, “Will it stay there?”

“My feelings are getting even funnier.”

“But will the snake…?”

“He’ll come if I whistle.”

“Will you?”

“What?” she asked, making her smile dirty.

The gown slipped from her shoulders. She stood, ankles well apart, hands on hips, then began humming an opening number, lifting one shoulder at him and then the other.

His eyes darted from her to the floor and back.

“Touch,” she invited.

He saw her mouth pout to whistle.

“Come on, it’s not cold,” she said. And whistled very softly.

He started back. “Jesus, Eve.…”

She began thrusting with her hips, jiggling her bosom, but all very slowly and in time to the soft, soft whistle.

Then turned her mouth into a big, welcoming smile.

His hand reached out for her, but she swayed back, teasingly. To touch her, he would have to take another step forward. He looked at the foot of the dressing table, as if measuring the distance with his eye.

“What’s the matter, baby? Haven’t you got?”

And she imitated the rearing action of her other pet, spreading her hand like a hood, and laughing at how funny this was. Which rather shocked her.

“For Christ’s sake!”

He was pointing behind her. Clint must have peeped his head out.

“Oh, so that’s what turns you on? I’ve got one like a little apple!”

Old gags always found their uses. And she turned, standing now with her ankles together, and smiled at him over her shoulder. While tightening one thigh muscle and then the other, knowing this would make her bottom bunch and bounce.

Bunch and bounce.

He had to. He started toward her. She raised her arms slightly so that he could slip his hands around and cup her, squeeze her, grab her.

As his sweating palms brushed her sides, she bent forward and dragged Clint out by the tail so his underneath rasped on the floor. This hurt him and he hissed.

Behind her, kitchy-coo nearly fell over himself.

“Eve, for God’s sake, put it in the basket!”

She tugged at the bow on her bikini, removed the patches rather painfully, and confronted him again, with the python once more over her shoulders, hanging like a tape measure.

“Come—and get it,” she said.

“This isn’t—”

“
Ach
, don’t keep Clinty boy waiting, baby—he wants to jump into his own beddy, too.”

“And—”

She nodded at the divan.

“All clothesy-wosies neatly folded.”

His dilemma was a knockout.

Up went the hands to his bow tie, but Clint’s head followed the movement, and they dropped away, shaking. She managed to get a hand to the basket and flipped back its lid. He started to tug his clothes off and a shirt button went
ping
against the wash basin without him noticing because he never took his eyes off her. Not once.

“I’m ready!”

“Look, Clint,” she giggled.

He glanced down at himself, over the slight potbelly, and saw nothing was happening.

“Oh, Jesus.…”

“You’ll just have to show him, Clint, won’t you? Or Eve’s going to be a very frustrated lady.”

The python went into the routine as if he knew it, but took his cues from the light touches she gave as her fingers fluttered and fondled. Clint was really a very, very dumb animal, but all the more lovable for it.

“It must be the snake!” he said. “This has never—”

“You’re not impotent, are you, my sweet? Not leading a girl on for nothing?”

“Perhaps it’s because I’ve never thought of you this—”

“Do I remind you of your mother?” She laughed.

There was the gleam again.

“What you’re doing to me isn’t bloody funny,” he pleaded.

His additional little problem had not been part of her plan— it was possibly as much of a surprise to her—but it was well worth cultivating. She brought Clint up from the front way, taking ages over it and watching its effect.

She must have overdone the last bit, because the problem suddenly disappeared.

“You’re really ready, then, my sweet?”

“
Eve
,” he begged in a whisper.

“Let’s make it an orgy, hey? The three of us?”

She had also dropped her voice very low.

“Please! I’ll pay anything. Just—”

That was the moment.

“Pay? It’s free! Come on!”

He stepped urgently toward her, stopping short.

How she laughed. Rocked and wheezed and pouted kisses. Laughed and laughed. Very softly, laughed and laughed. Staggered a little, too, and had to wind Clint once around her neck for him to stay aboard. Which brought on a coughing fit.

“Whore!” he snarled at her.

“Worm!” she retorted.

“I want!”

“I don’t—not with you, baby.”

“I will!”

“No, you bloody won’t!”

All this in whispers still.

“You think I’m scared?”

“Huh! I can
see
you are!” And she stuck out her tongue at him.

Pa had always cautioned that one day she would go too far with one of her acts. Do something to a man she wouldn’t believe possible.

Or upset a snake so much it would forget its manners and be forced to take advantage.

As she lay strangling in a scarlet hurricane on the floor of the dressing room, she had to agree, for the first time in her life, that the no-good old drunkard had been right about one thing.

Then her top plate fell out and she grimaced up at the ceiling like a Halloween lantern. One in which a candle guttered briefly before the pumpkin turned a dull rust color, all mottled and nasty.

2

M
ONDAY MORNING IN
the morgue was hell for some, heaven for others.

The NCO normally in charge, Van Rensberg, was on sick leave after an industrial accident—as the compensation papers called it—that had given him septicemia, and his place had been reluctantly taken by Sergeant Jacobus Kloppers, recently returned from Rhodesia’s northern border.

Kloppers was having adjustment problems. First to the idea of being out of the firing line, which he had secretly not enjoyed, and then to the fact that his previous billet had been usurped by a Jew. He wasn’t particularly anti-Semitery, or whatever the word was, but it remained inescapably the Jewishness of the bloke that was causing the trouble. It didn’t seem long since he had seen a story in the papers saying, FIRST JEWISH RECRUIT GRADUATES AT POLICE COLLEGE, and now Trekkersburg had one all to themselves, with more press pictures to prove it. JEWISH CONSTABLE IN CHARGE OF BOOK OF LIFE, said the headline on a clipping his wife had posted to him, while the caption had been a lot of rubbish about loving your country whoever you were. But seeing that all white citizens had their Book was a most responsible job, Kloppers had argued on his return, not something to be left to a rookie. His superiors, however, whose enthusiasm for the new regulation had always seemed suspect to him, hadn’t seen it that way. Any fool could supervise personal particulars, they told him, not that Oppenheimer was anything like a fool, only very junior, and what they needed desperately, higher up, was a seasoned man good at paper work. Yes, hopefully as good at it as he was, and willing to work in quiet surroundings, largely on his own for most of the time. In effect, the candidate would be virtually in charge of a department. An important one. Run it his own way. Would he take it? Good! A very wise move. Only he must be careful and always wear his rubber gloves.…